I'm all for people having choices but the deforestation has got to be having an impact on the ability of the ground to hold water....
What deforestation?
There is no deforestation in the US. We have more trees now than a hundred years ago and it’s been trending that way for 30 or 40 years.
Not so. There are actually more acres of forest in the US now than when Columbus landed. The giant lumber companies long ago figured out that they really and truly DID have a “renewable resource”...but only if they themselves managed same. And they have largely and efficiently done so. Forestry and forest management as practiced by the Weyerhausers and Georgia Pacifics of the world, where the BLM isn’t getting in the way, is a pretty sophisticated science at this point. The lumber companies are eager replanters of what they cut and in general are very sophisticated managers of their bread & butter. Just like all forms of modern agriculture, they spend plenty on satellite assessment and finding disease and insect resistant strains of trees, etc; etc;
It may be entirely so that “the southwest” which we all know, both from real data and from anecdote has been the center of US population growth as the formerly dense industrial areas of the midwest have sort of emptied out, has in all respects overtaxed its water potential. And it may be that this overtaxing has been “irresponsible” and “excessive”...we know that most large-scale things in the US have happened on that sort of basis. When will you see that? In times of severe drought, of course. That much, we certainly have. Whether it’s a “global warming” kind of “tipping point” or just a run of bad years, I don’t know. It’s absolutely the most typical thing in the world that when “man” has an excess of *anything* in the world of commodities, he takes no moves to save for the lean times; when prices are high, farmers overplant corn, which leads to corn prices getting smashed. (This happens to be occurring right now in corn and IMO is a profound investment opportunity-—but that’s another topic)
But from deforestation, no. I suspect (but do not know authoritatively) that the entire SW region is overdependent upon the single source of the Colorado River.
There are more trees in North America now than there were in 1491.